Wild River

NEW 35MM PRINT! ► A relatively unheralded and unknown work from the director of A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden, Wild River is nonetheless one of Elia Kazan’s greatest films. The stellar cast is headlined by Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick, and Jo Van Fleet. The film, shot on location in the Tennessee Valley, is a complex social-political drama and affecting love story set against the Depression-era New Deal. Clift plays a government man sent to a small rural community to convince an obstinate elderly woman (Van Fleet) to abandon the family farm so that a life-saving dam can be built. He becomes involved with the woman’s widowed granddaughter (Remick, in a superb performance), while his fair-minded treatment of local blacks incites racial tensions. Fleet, in her forties at the time, required four hours of make-up to play her octogenarian character. Although made for major studio by a name director working with a prestige cast, Wild River, due to its subject, was never given more than a perfunctory release and has long been difficult to see. This handsome new 35mm print showcases the film’s gorgeous colours, widescreen compositions, and lyrical use of landscape. “A masterful recreation of a difficult, complex period in American history” (All Movie Guide). “The film soars . . . It catches something timeless and essential in the human spirit” (Variety). Colour, 35mm. 109 mins.

Plays in a double-bill with Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life.